June 28, 2013 at 17:12Recruiting sales funnel: subtleties of application
Many recruiters have long adopted the tools used in sales, such as cold calls, mass mailings, and working with objections, and much more. I decided to look at the similarity of the sales and hiring processes more broadly and applied the long-established “sales funnel” tool in recruiting, and I got about the following:
1. Applicants - people who are potentially suitable for a given vacancy.
2. Profiles - people with whom we were able to contact and chat.
3. Interviews - candidates with whom an interview is scheduled.
4. Offers - candidates to whom the offer has been put forward.
5. Contents - candidates who have accepted the nominated offer.
6. Employees - candidates who have come to work.
What can be done to ensure that the final number of new employees is satisfactory?
Not so long ago, the article “ Intensity is more important than thoroughness ” raised the question of using the law of probability distribution, according to which it is enough to increase the flow at the input in order to obtain an increased flow at the output with remaining external factors.
Obviously, this approach does not work for recruiting in the general case for two main reasons:
1. Technicians are most often involved in the recruiting process, whose time is quite expensive, which generally increases the cost of recruiting staff and lowers the loyalty of these employees (instead of direct responsibilities they have to look through hundreds of resumes and dozens of interviews).
2. With the increase in the number of candidates at the entrance, the chances are also growing that dissatisfied applicants will broadcast negative messages about your company and possibly even about yourself to the outside world.
Therefore, the ideal solution would be to try to make a cylinder out of the funnel, or at least bring it closer to that state, that is, increase the conversion at each step. Here the book of J. Cox and E. Goldratt “ The Goal. The process of continuous improvement, ”which I read a few years ago. It details the effect of the so-called "narrow bottlenecks" that inhibit the overall process in certain places.
This is what happened to me when I tried to apply the theory of “bottlenecks” to the “sales funnel” in recruiting.
Let us imagine, for example, the following situation. We need to hire three specialists in the testing department, the critical requirements for which are having a testing certificate no older than 2 years from a particular educational institution. We know for sure that there are exactly 100 such people. We managed to contact sixty of them, thirty were invited for an interview, only five of them made job offers, three of them accepted and they went to work.
NB: in the general case, initially we do not know exactly what specific number of specialists suitable for our vacancy exists in the labor market. We need the Applicants level rather in order to choose the right segment and search tool. But in the particular case, as in the above example, a situation is possible when we know a specific number of suitable potential candidates.
In the presented diagram:
1) the numbers in squares reflect the number of applicants at each stage of recruiting;
2) the numbers at the arrows reflect the conversions at each step.
With the naked eye, the most “narrow neck” of our funnel is noticeable. Having spent 30 hours of technical interviewers time, we made only 5 job offers. The conversion was 16%. If you set a goal, you can calculate how much the company spent money exactly at the stage of the interview, the figure will be impressive.
Having decomposed the recruiting process in this way, you can clearly track the most “failed” places and try to improve them. How to do this? Use the simplest way that mankind has ever invented. You need to ask yourself the right question.
1. If you can’t find enough candidates that are potentially suitable for you, ask yourself: are we looking there?
Practice shows that if you have a top vacancy open, then most likely you will not be helped by a vacancy on a standard job search site. And if you need to find a large number of students for internships or courses, then Linkedin is not the best place for this.
2. If you find a sufficient number of resumes of specialists, but sending them to a technical interviewer for consideration, you get negative feedback, ask yourself the question: are we looking for those?
In this case, most likely, as practice shows, the problem lies in the fact that your idea of a candidate is different from that of a technical interviewer. You should not send for consideration all, without exception, resumes that came across to you during the search. The technical interviewer will be much grateful if the resume is not 30, but questionable, but 5, but to the point, verified by personal experience.
3. If you conduct a sufficient number of interviews, but do an extremely small number of offers, ask yourself the question: are we inviting those people for an interview?
The number of interviews you conduct per month is not your indicator of effectiveness. Do not invite people for an interview who are not interested in your company, do not beg them and drag them by force. Usually, potential candidates can independently determine their interest in your company and project, or its absence.
4. If you make enough job offers, but very few people accept them, ask yourself a few questions at once: do we make job offers? Are we the people we make them for? Are our candidates' expectations fully reflected in our proposals?
Take feedback from your candidates. Try to understand the root cause of the failure and try to eliminate it. You may even have to go back a step if you suddenly realize that just the wrong people were initially invited for an interview.
5. If your job offers are successfully accepted, but people do not go to work, ask yourself the following question: do we accompany candidates until the first working day?
However, based on the personal experience and the experience of my colleagues, low indicators at this step are extremely rare and are the exception rather than the rule.
Using a sales funnel in recruiting, you can allow yourself some flexibility in its application, which, of course, is a significant plus.
You can apply this approach to the entire recruiting department, taking for the reporting period, for example, six months or a year. If you are interested in the effectiveness of one individual recruiter, then you can take his personal indicators. You can evaluate the combination of “recruiter-technical specialist” in different combinations, if you have several employees participating in the same process. You can also apply this approach to evaluate work on a specific vacancy, or on vacancies in one technical department. There are a lot of use cases.
Of course, this does not mean that all the many options you need to use. Choose the most suitable of them for yourself, your team or company.
Little PS:After conducting a very small study with the help of some friendly companies (unfortunately, not all companies are ready to provide quantitative indicators to an external recruiter), I came to the conclusion that in most of them the indicators of the first three stages did not rise above 60%. On average, at these stages, conversions fluctuate around 30-40%.
And one more PPS: by bringing conversions to the level you need, you can artificially expand the funnel inlet neck to increase the number of new employees, or narrow it, depending on the needs of the company.
1. Applicants - people who are potentially suitable for a given vacancy.
2. Profiles - people with whom we were able to contact and chat.
3. Interviews - candidates with whom an interview is scheduled.
4. Offers - candidates to whom the offer has been put forward.
5. Contents - candidates who have accepted the nominated offer.
6. Employees - candidates who have come to work.
What can be done to ensure that the final number of new employees is satisfactory?
Not so long ago, the article “ Intensity is more important than thoroughness ” raised the question of using the law of probability distribution, according to which it is enough to increase the flow at the input in order to obtain an increased flow at the output with remaining external factors.
Obviously, this approach does not work for recruiting in the general case for two main reasons:
1. Technicians are most often involved in the recruiting process, whose time is quite expensive, which generally increases the cost of recruiting staff and lowers the loyalty of these employees (instead of direct responsibilities they have to look through hundreds of resumes and dozens of interviews).
2. With the increase in the number of candidates at the entrance, the chances are also growing that dissatisfied applicants will broadcast negative messages about your company and possibly even about yourself to the outside world.
Therefore, the ideal solution would be to try to make a cylinder out of the funnel, or at least bring it closer to that state, that is, increase the conversion at each step. Here the book of J. Cox and E. Goldratt “ The Goal. The process of continuous improvement, ”which I read a few years ago. It details the effect of the so-called "narrow bottlenecks" that inhibit the overall process in certain places.
This is what happened to me when I tried to apply the theory of “bottlenecks” to the “sales funnel” in recruiting.
Let us imagine, for example, the following situation. We need to hire three specialists in the testing department, the critical requirements for which are having a testing certificate no older than 2 years from a particular educational institution. We know for sure that there are exactly 100 such people. We managed to contact sixty of them, thirty were invited for an interview, only five of them made job offers, three of them accepted and they went to work.
NB: in the general case, initially we do not know exactly what specific number of specialists suitable for our vacancy exists in the labor market. We need the Applicants level rather in order to choose the right segment and search tool. But in the particular case, as in the above example, a situation is possible when we know a specific number of suitable potential candidates.
In the presented diagram:
1) the numbers in squares reflect the number of applicants at each stage of recruiting;
2) the numbers at the arrows reflect the conversions at each step.
With the naked eye, the most “narrow neck” of our funnel is noticeable. Having spent 30 hours of technical interviewers time, we made only 5 job offers. The conversion was 16%. If you set a goal, you can calculate how much the company spent money exactly at the stage of the interview, the figure will be impressive.
Having decomposed the recruiting process in this way, you can clearly track the most “failed” places and try to improve them. How to do this? Use the simplest way that mankind has ever invented. You need to ask yourself the right question.
1. If you can’t find enough candidates that are potentially suitable for you, ask yourself: are we looking there?
Practice shows that if you have a top vacancy open, then most likely you will not be helped by a vacancy on a standard job search site. And if you need to find a large number of students for internships or courses, then Linkedin is not the best place for this.
2. If you find a sufficient number of resumes of specialists, but sending them to a technical interviewer for consideration, you get negative feedback, ask yourself the question: are we looking for those?
In this case, most likely, as practice shows, the problem lies in the fact that your idea of a candidate is different from that of a technical interviewer. You should not send for consideration all, without exception, resumes that came across to you during the search. The technical interviewer will be much grateful if the resume is not 30, but questionable, but 5, but to the point, verified by personal experience.
3. If you conduct a sufficient number of interviews, but do an extremely small number of offers, ask yourself the question: are we inviting those people for an interview?
The number of interviews you conduct per month is not your indicator of effectiveness. Do not invite people for an interview who are not interested in your company, do not beg them and drag them by force. Usually, potential candidates can independently determine their interest in your company and project, or its absence.
4. If you make enough job offers, but very few people accept them, ask yourself a few questions at once: do we make job offers? Are we the people we make them for? Are our candidates' expectations fully reflected in our proposals?
Take feedback from your candidates. Try to understand the root cause of the failure and try to eliminate it. You may even have to go back a step if you suddenly realize that just the wrong people were initially invited for an interview.
5. If your job offers are successfully accepted, but people do not go to work, ask yourself the following question: do we accompany candidates until the first working day?
However, based on the personal experience and the experience of my colleagues, low indicators at this step are extremely rare and are the exception rather than the rule.
Using a sales funnel in recruiting, you can allow yourself some flexibility in its application, which, of course, is a significant plus.
You can apply this approach to the entire recruiting department, taking for the reporting period, for example, six months or a year. If you are interested in the effectiveness of one individual recruiter, then you can take his personal indicators. You can evaluate the combination of “recruiter-technical specialist” in different combinations, if you have several employees participating in the same process. You can also apply this approach to evaluate work on a specific vacancy, or on vacancies in one technical department. There are a lot of use cases.
Of course, this does not mean that all the many options you need to use. Choose the most suitable of them for yourself, your team or company.
Little PS:After conducting a very small study with the help of some friendly companies (unfortunately, not all companies are ready to provide quantitative indicators to an external recruiter), I came to the conclusion that in most of them the indicators of the first three stages did not rise above 60%. On average, at these stages, conversions fluctuate around 30-40%.
And one more PPS: by bringing conversions to the level you need, you can artificially expand the funnel inlet neck to increase the number of new employees, or narrow it, depending on the needs of the company.